438 Quotes by John Fowles

The only thing that really matters is feeling and living what you believe – so long as it’s something more than belief in your own comfort.

I have a strange illusion quite often. I think I’ve become deaf. I have to make a little noise to prove I’m not. I clear my throat to show myself that everything is normal. It’s like the little Japanese girl they found in the ruins of Hiroshima. Everything dead; and she was singing to her doll.

I’m Emma with her silly little clever-clever theories of love and marriage, and love is something that comes in different clothes, with a different way and different face, and perhaps it takes a long time for you to accept it, to be able to call it love.

I mean most women just want to be good at something, they’ve got good-at minds, and they mean deftness and a flair and good taste and what-not. They can’t ever understand that if your desire is to go to the furthest limits of yourself then the actual form your art takes doesn’t seem important to you. Whether you use words or paint or sounds.

There are only two races on this planet – the intelligent and the stupid.

The truth was I was not a cynic by nature; only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn’t found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love.

Man is about to be deprived of a great pole – work routine. The nightmare of capitalist society is unemployment; the nightmare of cybernetic society will be employment.

He uses my heart. Then turns and tramples on it.

Man is a highly acquisitive creature, brainwashed by most modern societies into believing that the act of acquisition is more enjoyable than the fact of having acquired, that getting beats having got.